Comparison vs Destination Shopping (Why Do Identical Stores Attract Different Customers?)

Key Insights

• Two stores under the same brand can be competing for completely different trips - one for a shopper weighing up options, one for a customer who decided before leaving the house.
• Comparison retailers cluster on purpose, because being next to a competitor grows the pull of the whole area. Destination and convenience retailers gain nothing from it.
• Catchment size tells you how many people are within reach. It doesn't tell you which kind of trip they're making, and that's what decides format, range and site selection.
• Footfall traffic data and mobility patterns look different for each location type, which is how you check whether a site is really the type you assumed it was.
  
  

What the sales figure doesn't tell you…

Walk past White Stuff in Cheltenham, then walk past White Stuff in Cirencester, and you’d struggle to spot the difference. Same brand, stock, and broadly the same store footprint - but the customers coming through the door have almost nothing in common.

In Cheltenham, the store sits on one of the region's busiest traditional high streets, surrounded by other retailers and picking up strong footfall throughout the day. People come to that area expecting choice, with multiple retailers competing for the same trip.

In Cirencester, a Cotswolds market town with a strong visitor economy, the customer mission changes - shoppers take more time, browse at a different pace and visit for a different reason entirely.

One store is competing for a comparison trip. The other is closer to a destination. Same brand, same shopfront, two completely different jobs - and two different strategies needed to make each location work.

FatFace trades a few doors away in both towns and faces exactly the same split, meaning this isn't just a quirk of one retailer. This is what happens when a brand works well enough to succeed in two very different kinds of location.

The reason someone walks through your door has a name: it's their mission. Not who they are on paper, but what they came to do. Get that understanding right and every decision that follows is based on a clearer picture: format, range, marketing spend and site selection.

In this article, we look at the three types of location, and how to work out which one you're really dealing with.

Why is it important to understand your customers, not just your catchment?

Yes, sales and footfall traffic data can tell you which locations are performing and where demand exists, but customer mix helps explain why those results look the way they do - and, more usefully, what to do next.

A catchment report can tell you that a site sits within reach of 60,000 people. What it won't tell you is whether those 60,000 come into the area for choice, come specifically for you, or come because you happen to be on the route they were taking anyway. 

Those are three different missions, and they reward three different kinds of site.

Two sites can have near-identical sales and similar catchment sizes, but attract completely different customers. That context is what gives the rest of your data its value. 

Comparison vs shopping vs convenience shopping  

It's worth taking a moment to explain the different types of retail locations, and what each one tells you about the customer walking in. 

How customer insight changes site, format and marketing decisions

Comparison shopping runs on uncertainty. The customer knows roughly what they want but not exactly where from, so they drift from store to store until something clicks. 

That psychology is why fashion, footwear, jewellers, and homeware retailers cluster on traditional high streets and in shopping centres with heavy footfall. Birds of a feather, and deliberately so: being close to competitors increases the appeal of the whole area, creating somewhere shoppers can compare several offers in one visit.

The cluster is what draws the customer into the area in the first place - no single retailer creates that trip on its own. That means the surrounding offer matters. A comparison store needs the right neighbours, a strong position within the retail circuit and enough passing footfall to keep putting it in front of undecided shoppers.



Destination shopping

Destination shopping plays by the opposite rulebook. The brand is chosen first, and the journey is planned around it.

IKEA, furniture warehouses and other big-box retailers don't need competitors next door, because the decision was made before the customer got in the car. 

Here, the retailer creates the trip rather than relying on the wider area to create it. The customer chooses the brand first, then works out how to get there.

That destination-led demand gives retailers flexibility others don’t have, opening up different location choices that can reduce costs while providing the space and ease of access that customers expect.

Convenience Shopping

Convenience shopping is driven less by choice and more by ease. Customers usually select the store that is closest, quickest or already part of their routine.

Supermarkets are a good example: nobody browses four different supermarkets before deciding where to buy milk and bread; these decisions are made based on convenience, proximity and habit.

Pharmacies and petrol station forecourts work in much the same way, with location decisions driven by accessibility and regular need.

This means proximity to competitors is less important. Convenience stores succeed by being easy to reach, rather than by clustering with similar retailers or drawing customers from a wide area.

Same location type, different missions

Knowing which of the three a site belongs to gets you a long way, but it doesn't get you all the way - because one location type can still serve very different missions.

The same brand can run three completely different missions under one roof, depending on the estate: the top-up shop on the way home, the grab-and-go lunch, the full weekly shop. 

Retailers already build separate formats around exactly this:

• Tesco Express - built for food-to-go and convenience trips, the top-up shop on the way home.
• Tesco Superstore - designed for a mix of planned shopping and top-up trips.
• Tesco Extra - built for larger, planned weekly shops.

Same logic on where to locate them, three very different shops.

City centres show how quickly that can change within a single site. Is the mission being driven by office workers, students, tourists or residents? The building might look identical on the outside, but those four customer types shop at different times, for different reasons, with different budgets - and a format designed around one will underperform for the other three.

How to tell which type you're looking at

Behind every one of those types of retail store location sits a catchment full of actual people - and location planning starts with understanding who they are.

Geodemographic classifications like CAMEO, which we supply across UK and international markets, are what turn that catchment from a population count into something usable - grouping areas by shared household, financial and lifestyle traits, rather than just age and income. 

But geodemographics only tells you what's in the catchment. Your own data tells you which slice of it you're actually converting. A site can be surrounded by exactly the right customer on paper and still fall short, because the offer, format or positioning isn't connecting with the people nearby.

Footfall traffic data adds what a catchment model can't: volume, dwell time, and how both change hour by hour, day by day. Compared against location type, the three look nothing alike:

• A destination site draws planned, weekend-weighted demand. Dwell time is long, visits are infrequent, and customers will drive past closer competitors to get there.
• A comparison site behaves like the cluster around it. The trip is long and spread across several retailers, so the footfall belongs to the area rather than to you.
• A convenience site is defined by how easy it is to get to. Dwell is short, the travel radius is tight, and for grocery and forecourt the peaks follow the commute.

Mobility data and spatial analysis go further still, showing where people are actually travelling from rather than relying on assumed drive-times - the kind of layering that location intelligence software like MVPLUS exists to do. When the pattern doesn't match the format, that's usually where the trading gap is.

On its own, store footfall data is just a number. Read alongside mission and location type, it explains why a site performs the way it does.

Same brand, different customers, different decisions

Back to those two White Stuff stores. If you treat both sites the same, you risk building for an average customer that doesn't really exist in either location.

Once you understand the mission, the mix, and how people actually use a location, you can focus on the right customer from day one - and build a stronger strategy around what each site actually needs.

That shows up in decisions you are already making: which range goes where and how deep it needs to be, how much floor space to give browsing rather than getting people through the till, when to staff up and for which kind of shopper. A comparison site and a destination site want opposite answers to most of those.

Every site you analyse gives you a clearer picture of the customers behind the numbers - helping you understand what to look for when you assess the next opportunity. Over time, you can identify similar sites based on the people they serve, rather than relying only on geographic regions.

Stop treating every site the same. Talk to GMAP about customer targeting, and building a network strategy based on how people actually shop.